This forum is for discussion of Secret Combinations: who/what they are and how to overcome them. "A secret combination that seeks to overthrow the freedom of all lands...is increasing its evil influence and control over America and the entire world." (ETB / Ether 8:18-25.)

(NaturalNews) On Wednesday, January 18, 2012, NaturalNews.com went "dark" to protest SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" that is actually a thinly-veiled government censorship effort. We are also protesting PIPA, the "Protect IP Act," which is similarly destructive in its effects. You may have arrived at this page from our mock "seizure" index page which depicts what might happen if SOPA becomes law.

This is crucial for all NaturalNews readers and fans to understand: If SOPA becomes law, NaturalNews.com will be shut down. In fact, the proposed law contains a specific provision -- section 105 -- which allows the U.S. government to shut down websites it claims "endanger public health."

Given that NaturalNews openly and repeatedly advocates things like natural sunlight and vitamin C -- both of which the government has said are dangerous -- our website could be seized by the government under SOPA. And that doesn't even consider our public stance against routine vaccinations, processed food chemicals and dangerous prescription medications (which the government is always trying to push on the public to kill people before they live long enough to collect social security).

If passed into law, SOPA would shut down NaturalNews, InfoWars, Drudge, Lew Rockwell, Reddit and many other alternative news websitesMake no mistake about the seriousness of this issue: If SOPA (or PIPA) becomes law, it will sooner or later result in the government seizure and shutdown of virtually all alternative news websites -- especially those that disagree with the criminality of the current corrupt political regime in Washington.

Imagine an internet without NaturalNews.com. Imagine the liberty movement without InfoWars.com. Imagine the entire world wide web being "sanitized" by the government to remove any websites that do not agree with the government's official position on finance, the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, pharmaceuticals and vaccines. That's what we're facing if SOPA becomes law: A virtual wipeout of all truth across the internet, leaving only the lies of "official" government information... the Ministry of Truth, in other words.

The Internet is the vehicle for restoring freedom and crushing tyrannyWhy is the U.S. government working so feverishly to crush independent, truthful information on the internet? Because the globalist controllers realize that the internet is the last bastion of freedom in a world run by global elite corporatists.

While the global elite own and run the mainstream (corporate whore) media, and they own Congress, and they own all the influential non-profits such as the wholly corrupt American Cancer Society, they do not yet control the internet! This freaks them out, especially when they see so much truth being produced by liberty-loving individuals who are exposing the neocons, the socialists, and the criminal-minded thugs who run Wall Street and the White House.

They are desperate to crush internet freedom and SOPA is the tool they hope to use to accomplish that. This is why your opposition to SOPA is absolutely crucial. It's also why internet giants such as Wikipedia and Reddit have joined in this one-day protest against the tyranny of SOPA and what is fast becoming a government-sponsored "information terrorism" campaign against free speech.

Take action NOW - or you will lose internet free speech foreverThis is an absolute must: Take action today to voice your opposition to SOPA. Here's how you can do that:

Click this link to email your Representative:http://house.gov/htbin/findrep(Use the little envelope icon that appears to the right of the picture to send them an email.)

Send your representatives and Senator a short message that covers the following fundamental points:

* You oppose SOPA.* You will not support or vote for any candidate that supports SOPA.* Urge them to vote against SOPA.

You can also call the capitol switchboard at: (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected with your representatives.

Obama may sign SOPA even if he says he opposes itIt is crucial that you take action now, because even though SOPA has been "shelved" and Obama has withdrawn his support for it, remember that Obama also promised he would veto the NDAA, yet he quietly and sneakily signed that on New Year's Eve, stripping Americans of their due process rights (http://www.naturalnews.com/034537_NDAA_ ... Obama.html).

Just because Obama says he opposes something doesn't mean he won't sign it! And believe me, the tactics of all these evil minions in Washington is to operate in darkness, meaning they will delay SOPA when people are paying attention but then, a few months later, after public awareness has waned, they will insidiously attach it to some spending bill and quietly make it law. One day you will wake up and all your favorite websites will simply be GONE. Remember, the government has already shut down 84,000 websites with no due process (http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government- ... by-mista...).

That's why you need to voice your opposition to SOPA right now and take a stand for internet Free Speech.

If you don't, you may very well wake up one day and find NaturalNews.com shut down, InfoWars.com removed from the 'net, and then your only remaining news options will be CNN, Fox, MSNBC and all the other sources of complete mind-controlled drivel that the corporate "sellout" establishment wants to drill into your head.

Finally, share this article on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Spread the word about SOPA. Encourage others to take action. Remember: The internet is the last bastion of freedom in our modern world. If we lose the internet, the corrupt criminals and tyrants who run Wall Street and Washington D.C. will have total, unrelenting control over all information, and your freedom will be suffocated under a police state agenda of total disinformation.

Spread the word. Take action. Protect freedom! Protect the People against government censorship!

I would say the internet is one of the last bastions of truth and freedom in today's world. TPTB have had to be subtle in attacking it, since any direct attempt at censorship or control would have the vast majority of internet users up in arms. As usual, they use the pretext of protecting us against a shadowy threat (in this case piracy), as a means of sneaking in their restrictions.

Many loud voices in the internet community, including Youtube video uploaders with large followings, are actively speaking out against SOPA. (As an aside, SOPA being passed would effectively destroy Youtube, even though Youtube is already complicit in government censorship.)

Just to add to that, sites like Reddit, Google, Wikipedia, and others are going black in protest against SOPA. Google has blacked out its logo, and if you go to Wikipedia you can type in your area code and it will link you to where you can contact local representatives about SOPA.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. 1 Corinthians 13:13

The secret behind SOPA, the so-called anti-piracy bill which is today the target of an unprecedented backlash with Wikileaks and other major websites ‘going dark’ to protest the legislation, has nothing to do with piracy or copyright theft – it’s about the formal effort to mimic Communist China’s system of Internet censorship.

But don’t take our word for it, listen to what Joe Lieberman, co-sponsor of PIPA, SOPA’s sister version in the Senate, said about the purpose of behind the US government’s efforts to control the Internet under the guise of cybersecurity.

Lieberman characterized fears that the US government would use such powers to censor political content as “total misinformation,” yet goes on to admit that the purpose behind the agenda is to mimic China’s ability to “disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war,” adding, “we need that here too”.

Of course, Communist China’s “war” is not against foreign terrorists or hackers, it’s targeted against people who dare to use the Internet to express dissent against government atrocities or corruption. China’s system of Internet policing is about crushing freedom of speech and has nothing to do with legitimate security concerns as Lieberman well knows.

Having largely failed in his bid to use fears over cyberwarfare, bearing in mind it was the United States and Israel who launched the Stuxnet attack, to achieve the ultimate goal of Internet control, Lieberman has returned with the same agenda only under a different guise – the Protect Intellectual Property Act – of which he is the co-sponsor.

Whether the justification is cybersecurity or anti-piracy, the end game remains the ability to seize control over the Internet and shut down websites on a whim.

Indeed, the is merely the act of legally codifying what is already taking place. Lieberman himself was instrumental in having the whistleblower website Wikileaks shut down when Amazon axed Wikileaks from its servers after being pressured to do so by Lieberman’s Senate Homeland Security Committee.

In addition, the Department of Homeland Security has already seized dozens of websites merely for linking to copyrighted material, despite the fact that such material isn’t even hosted on the website itself, a process the Electronic Frontier Foundation has criticized as, “Blunt instruments that cause unacceptable collateral damage to free speech rights.”

The DHS has also seized websites for no ostensible reason, including a popular music blog that was shut down for over a year on charges the DHS now admits were completely false.

While the likes of Wikipedia and Google have commendably protested against SOPA and PIPA, the big ISPs and domain name companies are firmly behind it. Indeed, the global authority over all .com domain names, VeriSign, recently demanded the power to terminate websites deemed “abusive” when ordered to by government without a court order or any kind of oversight whatsoever.

Although massive protests by the likes of Wikipedia and Google have delayed a vote on SOPA, the bill is set to return to the House floor next month.

The ultimate end game of SOPA is not merely about handing the federal government the power to shut down websites. Once such powers are granted, the only way to police such a system would be to require all website owners, and eventually anyone who posts any form of content on the Internet, to require permission from the state to do so. This will take the form of an individual Internet ID for every user – again part of Lieberman’s favored Chinese-style system – which can be granted or revoked at the discretion of the authorities.

The so-called “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace,” created by NIST under the auspices of the U.S. Commerce Department, purports to offer an “identity ecosystem” under which Americans will be able to protect their information not with passwords but with a “single credential” stored on a smart card, a cell phone, a keychain fob or some other kind of gadget. This will then be used to access a myriad of data, including tax returns, health information, bank accounts and more, amounting to a passport for your entire life.

Under such a system, the state will be able to create a far friendlier environment for controlling the flow of information, Bill Clinton’s proposed ‘Internet Ministry of Truth’ will flourish, and Hillary Clinton’s concerns about “losing the infowar” will be addressed.

This is the true secret behind SOPA, it’s another step towards abolishing anonymity and creating an infrastructure under which, just as in the physical domain, every act of commerce, communication or exercise of freedoms will first have to be approved by an authority figure before it is allowed to take place.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.

The underhanded effort to fundamentally alter the internet under the guise of protecting the copyrights of Hollywood and its transnational "entertainment" corporations was delivered a distinct set-back a few days ago when Congress retreated on its full-steam ahead effort to ram SOPA down our throats.

Faced with massive outrage and a political backlash, the Obama administration threatened a veto of the SOPA legislation and in response Congress shelved it.

Equally important is the battle to defeat PIPA, the Protect IP Act, which will soon be up for a vote. Congress needs to be told it must reject this legislation as well.

Even though the shelving of SOPA appears to be a victory, we cannot trust the government to not reintroduce the bill after sprucing it up as a kinder and gentler effort to rob of us our ability to freely disseminate information and speak our minds on the internet without fear of the censor's truncheon crashing down. After all, in 2010 the government shut down 73,000 web sites under the cover of fighting copyright infringement.

We must continue to let our "representatives" in Congress know that in no uncertain terms will we accept any modification of the internet at the behest of large corporations and the globalists who intend by hook or by crook to neuter the only free communication medium left to the people.

The ability to effectively shut down correlation and communication between like-minded people would end any real resistance to the LDG's. There would be no modern freedom movements without the internet.

Oh God, where art thou...?

D&C 136:21-23I am the Lord your God, even the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham and of Isaac and Jacob. I am he who led the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; and my arm is stretched out in the last days, to save my people Israel.

Even though the shelving of SOPA appears to be a victory, we cannot trust the government to not reintroduce the bill after sprucing it up as a kinder and gentler effort to rob of us our ability to freely disseminate information and speak our minds on the internet without fear of the censor's truncheon crashing down. After all, in 2010 the government shut down 73,000 web sites under the cover of fighting copyright infringement.

We must continue to let our "representatives" in Congress know that in no uncertain terms will we accept any modification of the internet at the behest of large corporations and the globalists who intend by hook or by crook to neuter the only free communication medium left to the people.

This is well said. Expect them to come back again, perhaps after some "crisis" to ram the desired legislation through. We must remain vigilant in defense of freedom of speech and communication. It is the only way to counteract the Big Lies.

The internet is something Hitler and Goebbels did not have to contend with, but as we understand the Big Lie principle still used by those seeking global power, we can appreciate the power of the internet to allow us to challenge the Big Lies before us: 9/11 and the 9/11 wars, bank bail-out justifications, "deficits don't matter," man-caused global warming, and so on.

Said Jesus,"unto you, the Twelve, and those, the First Presidency, who are appointed with you to be your counselors and your leaders, is the power of this priesthood given, for the last days and for the last time..." DC 112

On Wednesday January 18, 2012 over 7,000 websites 'blacked out' in open protest of new legislation called SOPA and PIPA, which would have a chilling effect on free speech on the Internet and for all Americans.

ALIPAC would like to offer our full opposition to the SOPA and PIPA legislation as written because the legislation is so broad our primary mission to collect and archive all information possible about America's illegal immigration invasion could be stopped by the legislation.

We did not black out our website at http://www.ALIPAC.us because it is new and still under construction after a recent revamping, but we are going to make our opposition to SOPA our first activist alert for 2012!

For the last few years, we have been warning Americans about the three "nation breakers" that the same power factions supporting Amnesty for illegal aliens want to see applied to Americans in their quest for power and domination over us.

1. We have warned that these corrupt elites will try to pass a form of Amnesty which would eventually puts millions of illegal immigrants into a new voting block permanently displacing American voters who would stand up for Border Security. These illegal immigrants, once legalized, will then be given preference in government and corporate hiring and placed in positions of dominion over once sovereign American citizens.

2. We have warned that these corrupt elites will try to stifle freedom of Speech in America and on the web to prevent Americans from stopping their plans as we have in the past by stopping their amnesty legislation.

3. We have warned that they will eventually try to disarm the American public depriving us of our 2nd amendment rights to make their power over us permanent and supreme and insulated from any significant resistance to an increasingly diabolical series of abuses. With the British and Australians recently disarmed and dis-empowered, Americans are the last besieged and faltering bastion of freedom and citizen empowerment with rights.

We see SOPA and PIPA as the latest attempts by our US government, which is becoming more dictatorial and more authoritarian like their Chinese and Saudi Arabian counterparts each week, to silence free speech.

We have become experts in free speech and civil rights matters at Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) because our free speech and civil rights are under constant attack and our government appears to be helping the attackers more than American defenders like us.

Our website at http://www.ALIPAC.us is under constant attack from illegal alien supporters who do their best to disrupt our communications and our operations. They have proven there is no low they won't go to including hacking and vicious Internet troll attacks.

On Sunday January 15, 2012 Google Inc. literally handed over the master e-mail control and password to our youtube account previously at ALIPAC1's Channel - YouTube to an illegal alien supporting attacker. All of our videos that contain over 4 years of our work have been deleted. These videos had over 4.3 million views and were expressions of ALIPAC's civil rights and free speech. They are all gone and so far Google has not responded to our numerous requests for assistance and account restoration.

Then there was the RightHaven copyright trolls that sued ALIPAC and hundreds of other bloggers trying to shake all of us down for money. We are thankful that many groups aligned to fight back and RightHaven has been stopped by the courts, but this attempt to silence those of us on the web that compile, analyze, aggregate, and utilize news articles was a very close call.

Then there is the attack of free speech that occurs when illegal alien supporters like NCLR La Raza (The Race), SPLC, ADL, Media Matters, MALDEF, LULAC, and a constellation of hundreds of other groups label an American peacefully speaking out against illegal immigration as a violent racist. These well financed national smear efforts have a terrible chilling effect on free speech for all Americans. Talk show hosts and news casters are encouraged not to allow those of that represent the views of most Americans on the air due to false claims of tenuous ties to mysterious racist blogs.

I have dubbed what these groups try to do to us as "hooding." They attempt to silence those of us who become public figures by intimidation and libel. Minorities that believe this hostile propaganda would deem us worthy of violence or death because of our views.

What these invasion supporting groups do is the equivalent of tying an innocent man or woman to a utility poll in a urban minority neighborhood, taping their mouth shut, and putting a white hood on them to leave them to their fate. This "hooding" has become so prominent that now even the Executive Branch and the Department of Homeland Security are using this despicable technique to vie for more power and control over the disgruntled American populace.

In case many of you have not heard, this week the White House began meeting with police leaders from across America to explain to them that the new threat are Domestic Terrorists and that the Domestic Terrorists are not Muslim exremists. Here is how they are describing domestic terrorists to police.

Does this new Homeland Security release information describe anyone you know?

Homeland Security wants local police now looking for American citizens that...

""...increasingly spoke out against the government, blamed the government for perceived problems and did so in a way that caught the attention of other people in their communities, according to the senior counterterrorism official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private White House event. Subjects became active on the Internet to espouse extremist views. In some cases, the subjects purchased weapons, ammunition...Analysts found that a person's origin, ethnic background and socioeconomic status are not good indicators for potential violent extremist activity, the senior counterterrorism official said." -- Huntington Post, January 18, 2012

So now the Obama administration is seeking to silence you by sending you the message that law enforcement is now on the lookout for American citizen gun owners that speak out against the government or government policies instead of going after the murderous illegal alien drug and alien smugglers that are armed with assault weapons provided by the Obama administration. Yes, Americans speaking out against the government are now the targets of Janet Napolitano's Homeland Security more than the Muslim extremists that comprise over 90% of those charged with and convicted of terrorism in the US in the last ten years.

The 9/11 terrorist never spoke out against the US Government online. Tim McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, never organized online. In fact, the Obama administration offers no verifiable proof that there are any substantiation to these claims!

This is the same government that recently had to retract leaked documents claiming US veterans and citizens that support Ron Paul or fight against abortion, high taxes, and illegal immigration are potential terrorists.

While some of the left may be chuckling and rooting Obama on right now, they will come for you once they are done enslaving the Americans they worry about standing up to them effectively. Americans on the left, right, and center need to unify against these numerous attacks on American liberties and Constitutional governance.

At ALIPAC, we have archived entire articles for the last 7 years because when we started the Internet had no long term memory on these topics. Now our archives are used by citizens, journalists, researchers, lawmakers, candidates, etc...

Since we started, many of the older articles on our site no longer appear at the sources that first reported them. Reports of gang rapes by illegal aliens and school riots between black and Latino students have disappeared or been altered since their original publication. Our archive work at ALIPAC.us at least gives the American public a chance to know what is really going on.

But of course the elites who support the illegal immigration invasion of America have noticed our work and our successes and they conspire to take us down and silence us any way they can.

We encourage the 40,000+ national supporters of ALIPAC to get on the phones to Congress right away to say "I oppose the SOPA and PIPA legislation and want Congress and Obama to keep your hands off of free speech on the web."

You can even use our brand new Congressional contact list that has many new features.

Let's burn up those phone lines to DC once again and stop this latest attempt to silence groups like ALIPAC.

People ask me all the time why illegal immigration is allowed to continue and how Obama can get away with the things he is doing.

I'll tell you the answer to those questions, it is because not enough Americans are standing up and speaking out yet. These bad things are happening because not enough Americans are taking the time to learn what is really going on and choosing to dedicate themselves to real reform.

Stand up and speak out against illegal immigration, against Obama's unlawful gun running and amnesty for illegal aliens, against SOPA, PIPA, and the NDAA. Speak out while you still can and if you chose to bow down and stand down against those that would intimidate or threaten you into silence, it will likely be one of the last choices you are allowed to make for yourself in the ruins of what is left of America and the American dream.

"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Megaupload takedown is dominating headlines, but there is something the incident has overshadowed – large internet corporations and government have censored political websites for years as part of a plan to domesticate the internet.

Censorship of the internet is not simply for the Chinese.

On Thursday, Paul Joseph Watson pointed out the hypocrisy of Google as the transnational corporation shouldered its way into the limelight by opposing SOPA while enforcing SOPA-like policies of its own, blacklisting legitimate websites from its news aggregator and following government orders to remove material from its search results and You Tube.

Watson notes that Google has delisted both Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com – the flagship websites of nationally syndicated talk show host Alex Jones – from its popular news website and news search engine. Google News is a content aggregator that allows users to search thousands of news sources for relevant stories.

Google has memory holed these two websites from its news portal for political reasons and not because they are insignificant and draw paltry traffic. In fact, Infowars.com is a major news source that gets more traffic than MSNBC.com and many other corporate media news websites.

Google is not alone in attempting to blunt Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. MySpace, Time Warner, New Zealand’s Asia Netcom, the ISP Tiscali in the UK and even a British aiport – along with a number of libraries and government-owned entities – have shut out Alex Jones’ popular websites.

In addition to blocking and censoring Jones’ news websites, Google property YouTube has consistently taken down his videos and fiddled with hit counters and other metrics to make it seem the videos are less popular than they actually are.Google’s effort to censor Alex Jones and other dangerous alternative media sites makes sense when you realize the company has intimate ties with the CIA and the military-industrial complex.

The establishment has worked behind the scenes for years to devise a method to sanitize the internet – in the same way corporate television has been disinfected for decades – and drive the truth-seekers and tellers off the medium. SOPA and PIPA, under the guise of fighting dreaded copyright criminals, is only the latest guise.

In 2010, globalists meeting in Davos, Switzerland, called for internet licensing by the United Nations in order to combat so-called cyber warfare of the sort the shadowy Anonymous hacktivist collective used against the Department of Justice and the FBI following the Megaupload takedown.

For at least three years, the corporate media has trumpeted a vastly exaggerated threat of cyber terrorism and illustrated the warning with dire scenarios of disabled power grids and hobbled civilian infrastructure.

Former president Bill Clinton has called for a government-run internet “Ministry of Truth” to get rid of pesky troublemakers – his wife recently admitted the government is losing the information war – and Obama’s information czar Cass Sunstein has demanded that websites be mandated by law to link to opposing information or that pop ups containing government propaganda be forcibly included on political blogs.

Sunstein had previously called for a COINTELPRO-like effort against politically incorrect activist groups and also called for the government to tax or even ban outright political opinions it finds objectionable.

Finally, the Pentagon has declared the internet a battlefield and recently stated it will respond to so-called cyber attacks militarily. “If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks,” a military official said last May.

The military response to exaggerated cyber threats was put on the fast track by Obama in 2009 when he instructed the Pentagon to attack “cyberthreats” within the United States. Instead of allowing local police response to suspected cyber crimes, Obama moved to violate Posse Comitatus and turn the United States into a combat zone:

“The Obama administration has adopted new procedures for using the Defense Department’s vast array of cyberwarfare capabilities in case of an attack on vital computer networks inside the United States, delicately navigating historic rules that restrict military action on American soil,” the New York Times reported at the time.

SOPA and PIPA are merely part a larger and more comprehensive effort to control the internet and reduce the threat it poses to the government. Both laws are efforts to codify what has been going on now for several years.

The defeat of SOPA and PIPA are certainly welcome and the large response in opposition to the legislation is a positive development, however we must consider the larger and more ominous threat the government and the transnational corporations it answers to pose to our liberty and the ability to communicate and raise political awareness.

Many of us breathed a sigh of relief when an overwhelming amount of Americans banned together and voiced their opposition to Congress over both the Stop Online Piracy Act, and Protect Intellectual Property Act.

Sites that dimmed the screen for a day or two have gone back to normal – Facebook users have swapped their anti-SOPA images for their previous profile pictures.

We may have even believed that the postponement of the vote originally scheduled for January 24th was some sort of white flag of capitulation. But that is certainly not the MO of most lawmakers.

While the outcry did get the attention of Congress, they are simply returning unflinchingly back to the drawing board to wait out our attention spans. Articles whirled that SOPA was dead and the bill was pulled when the bill’s sponsor Lamar Smith said in a statement that there would be no further action “until there is wider agreement on a solution.”

Lamar isn’t really listening. “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.”

Actually, SOPA is set to be reformulated in February. PIPA will be revisited with possible amendments in the coming weeks. Case in point, all is still open and possible — nothing is dead, pulled, or cancelled. If that wasn’t enough to keep us on our toes, a new, similar bill has surfaced.

Déjà Vu in the form of OPEN — The New Anti-Piracy Bill

As an alternative to SOPA-PIPA, Representative Darrell Issa (CA-R), and 24 co-sponsors introduced the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) H.R. 3782 on Wednesday, during the Internet blackout.

From PCWorld:

OPEN would give oversight to the International Trade Commission (ITC) instead of the Justice Department, focuses on foreign-based websites, includes an appeals process, and would apply only to websites that “willfully” promote copyright violation.

The bill pretends to only target foreign websites, while keeping Americans free to surf and post, but the bill’s wording is wide open to pursue American sites. Just one example: when describing an infringing site, it starts with those “that are accessed through a non-domestic domain name,” but continues in section (8)(A)(ii) for any site that “conducts business directed to residents of the United States.”

It sounds like, “in general,” copyright holders will be the ones filing complaints to the Commission, but the writing leaves it open for any complainant to file. The ITC would still have the ability to coerce payment processors and ad networks to cease funding and linking the accused in question. Who could determine “willful” infringement?

Also, none of these bills had been decided before the U.S. Government took down New Zealand owned Megaupload.com during the commotion. To which, Anonymous responded by shutting down the websites of the U.S. Department of Justice, Universal Music, Recording Industry Association of America, the U.S. Copyright Office, Broadcast Music Inc. and the Motion Picture Association of America.

“The [DOJ's] action ‘demonstrates why we don’t need SOPA in the first place,’ points out PCWorld’s Tony Bradley.” The government was enforcing a previous anti-piracy law called PRO-IPsigned by Bush in 2008.

OPEN is gaining support from groups like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Consumer Electronics Association and more.

While it seems admirable that the bill is transparent and open for public comment, most laws of this nature are broad and allow for bigger, no-common sense crackdowns later. Plus, there might only be a couple concessions and the pacifying effects of “being heard.”

One commenter of the bill aptly noted:

‘Reasonable belief’ and ‘credible evidence’ are too vague and have the appearance of inviting highly subjective interpretation with the option for the commission and/or the provider to exercise sweeping powers with impunity.

Whenever any group is appeased after a battle, it cannot be emphasized enough — the lawmakers’ modus operandi will be: aim high, brace for the outcry, make a couple alterations and sneak the bill back in when no one’s looking. Keep it going and going. Call it by a different name. Haggle. It appears there is compromise and reasoning now, but once the bill passes into law, reason goes out the window, and we are the only ones compromised.

Theft is a reality — although not one that has seriously damaged the growing entertainment industry, or caused massive death and devastation. If Hollywood, pitching the biggest fit, were actually going down, why should we go down with it?

It is more unfortunate that Americans must be so tirelessly vigilant to protect their online activities from the same lawmakers who are tanking the country in so many other truly devastating ways.

The dismantling of Internet freedom will not stop here. Let’s borrow an MO and not let up.

To SOPA — Say NOPA!

To PIPA — Pipe down!

To OPEN — Shut it!

Similar/Related Articles

Resistance is Victory: SOPA And PIPA Sponsors Caving In To OppositionSOPA/PIPA Battle Rages: Tell Congress We Will Not Accept CensorshipCongress Retreats on SOPA and PIPABill Killed: SOPA death celebrated as Congress recalls anti-piracy actsVote On PIPA Internet Censorship Bill PostponedSOPA and PIPA bills could threaten natural health websites with government-ordered shutdownSOPA shelved until ‘consensus’ is foundNightly News: SOPA and PIPA On the RunMaher Supports SOPASOPA and PIPA Part of Effort to Domesticate Politically Incorrect InternetWikipedia threatens strike over US piracy billThe Tide Is Turning Against SOPA And We Might Actually Succeed In Stopping It

Unsurprising that they barely waited weeks to try again. I imagine they were surprised at the opposition here when so many other bills blatantly violating our rights went through without a hitch.

I somehow doubt the same outcry will continue to be raised every time they try. Resistance will slowly die, especially if the media is fully supporting it, until eventually they pass everything they want. I consider it amazing SOPA and PIPA were shot down in today's political climate.

Still, nothing to be done but to keep trying to raise awareness and rally the forces to constant vigilance.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. 1 Corinthians 13:13

Fairminded wrote:It appears as if this bill ACTA is them trying again more quietly this time, and it appears to be successful because almost nobody's mentioned it. Does anyone know more about it?

ACTA is not a bill, its a United Nations Treaty!!.....its far worse than SOPA or PIPA combined. (one of 4 international treaties Barry is going to sign, or has already) Parasitical socialists running this country now.

LDSFreedomForum.com does not necessarily agree with all content on this forum. This is not an official site of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.The views and content on this site reflect only the opinions and teachings of the authors of the respective content contained herein.